Theory predicts that default breach remedies are immaterial whenever contracting costs are negligible. Some experimental studies, however, suggest that in practice default rules do matter, as they may affect parties' preferences over contract terms. This paper presents results from an experiment...

This paper provides an economic foundation for non-binding mediation to stimulate first collective bargaining agreements, as implemented in British Columbia since 1993. We show that the outcome of first-contract mediation is Pareto efficient and proves immune to the insider-outsider problem of...

This paper studies markets plagued with asymmetric information on the quality of traded goods. In Akerlof's setting, sellers are better informed than buyers. In contrast, we examine cases where buyers are better informed than sellers. This creates an inverse adverse selection problem: The market...

Transaction costs are a major reason why international trade flows are much smaller than traditional trade theory would suggest. Trust between trading partners lowers transaction costs and may therefore enhance trade. The empirical analysis of this paper shows that more trust leads to more trade...

In this note, we experimentally examine the relative performance of price-only auctions and multi-attribute auctions. We do so in procurement settings where the buyer can give the winning bidder incentives to exert effort on non-price dimensions after the auction. Both auctions theoretically...

If a government auctions the right to market a good, continuity is likely to be of significant importance. In a laboratory experiment, we compare the effects of bidders' limited liability in the first-price sealed-bid auction and the English auction in a common value setting. Our data strongly...

We present an experimental test of a shirking model where monitoring intensity is endogenous and effort a continuous variable. Wage level, monitoring intensity and consequently the desired enforceable effort level are jointly determined by the maximization problem of the firm. As a result,...

We examine factors that may contribute to 'overconfidence' in relative ability on an intelligence test. We test experimentally for evidence of self-esteem concerns and instrumental strategic concerns. Errors in Bayesian updating are rare when the information does not involve own relative...

We study the impact of advice or observation on the depth of reasoning in an experimental beauty-contest game. Both sources of information trigger faster convergence to the equilibrium. Yet, we find that subjects who receive naïve advice outperform uninformed subjects permanently, whereas...

This discussion paper resulted in a publication in the <A href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167487010000929">'Journal of Economic Psychology'</A>, 31(6), 964-84.<P>In repeated number guessing games choices typically converge quickly to the Nash equilibrium. In positive expectations feedback experiments, however, convergence to the equilibrium price tends...</p></a>